The Institute for Learning in Retirement (ILR) is proud to introduce Harold Kirk as a member of the ILR faculty. Dr. Kirk will be teaching his course in November and will take his students on a voyage exploring the world within the atom, from the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 through present discoveries in the field of particle physics.

Harold was born in Konawa, Oklahoma. As a boy, he always had an interest in mathematics and science and attended high school in Oklahoma City. He earned a B.S. in Physics (1964) and a Ph.D. in Physics (1972) at the University of Oklahoma. In 1970, as a Fulbright Scholar, he did graduate studies and research at the Technical University in Aachen, Germany. Harold continued to work and teach at the Technical University as a research physicist from 1972 to 1977. He returned to the U.S. and joined the staff in the physics department at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York in 1977. He retired from the Brookhaven laboratory in 2016. Dr. Kirk’s primary fields of interest are High Energy Physics and Accelerator Beam Physics. He is currently teaching Particle Physics in the OLLI program at Stony Brook University in New York.

Harold and his wife Sylvia bought a home in SaddleBrooke in 2018. They are winter residents and share their time between Tucson and Port Jefferson, New York. Other than the world of physics, Harold enjoys golf, nature, reading and all types of music. The ILR welcomes Harold to its faculty. Look forward to his class on particle physics named “Inside the Atom” that starts in November. For more information about his class and dates, visit sbilr.org.


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